Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Skrbina interview pt. 2: Towards a sense of the sacred

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This is Part 2 of a mind-bending interview with David Skrbina on "is technology destroying humanity?" (Listen to Part 1 here.)

David Skrbina teaches philosophy at the University of Michigan. A philosopher in the original sense of the term ("lover of wisdom"), David has just published The Metaphysics of Technology – a book that stands in the tradition of important critical works on technology beginning with such 19th-century voices as Thoreau, Butler, and Ruskin, through the 20th century critiques of Ellul, Juenger, Borgmann, Mumford, Heidegger, Skolimowski, and of course Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, whose latest book David introduced and edited.

Even if you're not quite up to speed on the metaphysics, you'll have to admit that Skrbina makes a good case that we have let that ostensibly neutral servant, technology, enslave us…and that our smartest move would be to relinquish much of it before it completes the process. (For details on how technology is likely to kill our children before their time – a common target date for the "death of humanity" a.k.a. "the singularity" is 2045, when my kids will have just reached middle age – read Bill Joy's Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.)